


An Aberration

by Lafayette1777



Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Co-Parenting, F/M, Getting Together, Pining, Post-Canon, anyways theyre working on having feelings, listen man.....these two got me fucked up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 06:10:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19901083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lafayette1777/pseuds/Lafayette1777
Summary: He sees himself as someone so guarded and self-contained, she thinks, but in the end he’s more bare than any of them.





	An Aberration

**Author's Note:**

> am i surprised to be here? i really should not be
> 
> thanks for reading friends!!

She can’t quite recall exactly how it starts, but maybe it’s this: when they shared that hotel room during the Sandbrook case and she woke in the night, as she was prone to do then, and her pillow was wet with tears. She’d choked on a sob once, twice, biting the inside of her cheek in an attempt not to wake the strange, dark shape of Hardy next to her. She hadn’t shared a bed with a man in months, by then. In the dream, her house had smelled of gas. She walked into the half-painted bedroom just as Joe lit a match.

She thinks now that Hardy must have already been awake, that the swiftness and sureness with which he’d reached a hand out for her in the dark had an air of expectation to it, as if he’d known she might need this. Later, she’ll find out that he still dreams of Pippa, of that wet slog, those long moments alone, and in the dream the blood and mud are so caked that the face of the girl in his arms could be Daisy, he can’t be sure. He can never be sure. 

In the dark, he found Ellie’s hand, and held it. Said nothing. Their mutual existence in space, enough.

(Years pass before she feels the slide of his palm against hers again. Or it could be no time at all.)

When the Trish Winterman case wraps what follows in its wake are a series of minor offenses that end up serving to clear Ellie’s palate. Drugs turn up on the beach and must be traced to their criminal source. A deli is broken into, its till raided. A man is accused of beating his wife in one of the upscale seaside neighborhoods; Ellie is close enough to the area when the call comes in that she and a DC head over themselves. She ends up splattered with the wife’s blood as the husband goes in for a final blow before being slammed to the ground. Ellie cuffs him herself, the blood drying on her face, the woman sobbing at her feet. 

Ellie sits with her on the front stoop as they wait for the ambulance, holding a tissue to the wife’s jagged nose, unsure where the other woman’s trembles end and her own begin. She could cry, now—she could always cry, despite the multiplying years, feels just a step away from it all times—but she doesn’t. Maybe she’s moving on.

“I can’t stand him,” the woman says, finally, her voice ragged. Eyes unfocused. “Any of them.”

Abruptly, Ellie can see all the traitorous men she’s encountered, spread out before her like dolls in the grass, powerless beneath her gaze. She lets out a breath.

“They’re not all like that,” Ellie says, tiredly, hoping that one day she believes it.

The sun has only just begun to set when she makes it back to her desk. The room is nearly empty, the blinds drawn against the dying light, but a report of the incident is expected of her and she knows there is solace to be found in rote work. Hardy, of course, is still at work in his office, scrutinizing his laptop with a scowl on his face and glasses perched on his nose. She allows herself a moment to look at him, then turns back to her screen.

When she wanders by his office in search of a cup of tea, he calls out to her.

“Miller, can you make any sense of this?” he asks, without looking up from the screen. “I’m at a loss.”

She never finds out what has managed to vex him, because he finally glances up at her and his perplexed frown is replaced by an entirely different kind of grimace. 

“Jesus Christ, what happened to you?”

He’s on his feet before Ellie can process what he’s saying, before she can hide the surprise on her face when he touches her chin, turning it to inspect her neck. “Miller, are you bleeding?”

“Oh,” she says, gaining back her breath to let out a bleat of a nervous laugh. “It’s not my blood. Nothing to sneeze about.”

There can’t be much left—just a few drops on her collar, a few on her collarbone. But still he is abruptly close, looking at her with an indignation entirely out of proportion to the situation itself. “Right,” he grunts, looking unconvinced.

His thumb is still on her chin, just barely depressing her skin, his breath warm against her cheek. Her eyes dart briefly down, and the hand drops. 

“Sorry,” he says.

“No worries,” says Ellie, watching him carefully. He takes a light step back, and so does she, and even then the space between them still ripples with heat.

It’s been happening more often lately, she thinks. Or maybe it’s just because they’re spending more time together, however inadvertently, and inevitably the collisions will come more frequently. Those moments where they seem to be standing on a precipice, aware that if they’re going to jump they should do it together, but neither of them willing to take the first step.

In the evenings, they often have a drink at Hardy’s and watch the sun set over the cliff, sliding door open to let in the briny air. Daisy, sometimes, joins them, putting her feet up on the table and humoring her father as he asks her to recount her day. She’ll be heading to Durham for university in the fall, a fact which sets Hardy scowling at the slightest mention.

“Are you going to look out for him when I’m gone?” she asks one evening, cornering Ellie in the kitchen when she slips in to place her mug in the sink. 

“Me?” Ellie replies, eyebrows raising. 

“Who else?” says Daisy, her voice a low whisper. Ellie glances back toward the other room where Hardy is reclined, gangly limbs spilling over his chair and a glass held loosely in his dangling left hand.

Ellie smirks. “I’ll try to keep an eye on him.”

Fred sometimes comes by too, when school’s finished and there’s no football practice. Hardy had taken a liking to him during their Sandbrook investigation—perhaps only because Fred could not yet talk at the time and therefore could not engage in any of the social conventions Hardy found vapid. Fred still calls him “Uncle Alec” and doesn’t understand why Ellie giggles every time she hears him say it.

This afternoon, though, Daisy heads out to have dinner with a friend and Fred is still at practice; she and Hardy have the evening to themselves. She lingers in the kitchen, watching him—the ease of his posture and the intimacy it suggests. She’d slipped into trusting him long before she’d had any affection for him and he’d taken her into his confidence long before he could stand to be in her presence for any length of time. There’s something in that, she thinks. Something she should be paying attention to.

“Miller?” He’s shifting now, turning his head back toward her inquisitively.

“Coming,” she says, and steps out of the kitchen and into the afternoon light.

A man goes missing in a forest outside of town. There’s no immediate evidence of foul play but the investigation drags on as no corpse turns up and no one seems to be able to offer any useful information. He told his family he was going for an afternoon hike and would be back by dinner—he had no obvious vices or enemies. Ellie spends long days joining the search parties that comb every crevice of the woods, hunting for any indication of where the man has gone. After five days, they find his shoes, arranged neatly beneath a tree, and nothing else. 

“This doesn’t make any fucking sense to me,” Hardy says, as they walk home together one night. They’re both out of their usual suits and instead have had to surrender themselves to clothes more appropriate for bushwhacking—jeans and t-shirts and hiking boots and gloves, always gloves. This is not the first time she has seen Hardy out of work clothes but still there is something strange in it, something that seems unbearably intimate.

“You don’t think it’s possible he just decided to leave?” she asks, taking a breath of salty air as they approach his street. “Just start a new life some place?”

“What kind of man would do that?” Hardy says, the kinetic energy of his indignation forcing her to increase her pace to keep up with him. 

“I don’t find it that hard to imagine,” she says quietly, and he abruptly stops walking. “And neither should you, truthfully.”

It’s past sunset; the street is all but deserted.

“There’s nothing shameful about wanting to start over,” she adds, meeting his wide-eyed gaze. “Maybe he’ll stumble back when he’s ready. You did.”

“Ready for what?” he asks. They’re standing too close together; she can see every crease in his face, the smear of dirt above his eyebrow.

“You’ve got something—” She’s bringing a thumb up to wipe away the smudge before she can stop herself, her hand lightly cradling his cheek. He doesn’t pull away from the touch. “There,” she murmurs, and draws her arm back, the dirt blended away from his skin and into her thumbprint.

Hardy looks at her for a long moment. They’ve reached the turn off for his house already; he pivots left and disappears around the corner without a word.

Tom, as soon as he was eighteen, moved to Weymouth, and though Ellie tried valiantly to be angry with him, to feel abandoned and scorned, all she could muster was sympathy—it is not hard to imagine the difficulties of living a life in Broadchurch as the son of Joe Miller. So on free Saturdays she drives down to have dinner with him and bring him any odds and ends she thinks of, most of which are things he has already or doesn’t need, but he humors her anyway by taking them. They are on easier terms now than they have been in years. Tom is so grown up, so filled with a quiet, forceful dignity, that it astounds and disturbs her in equal measures. 

Inevitably when she goes to Weymouth at some point in the evening she will receive a text—Hardy, asking after the boy, and her. And inevitably she will look at the combination of words he has sent her—always a little different in arrangement, though similar in tone—far longer than is necessary to compose her usual reply: _yes, he’s fine,_ she writes, _we’re all doing fine._

In August, Hardy drives Daisy up to settle in at Durham; somehow Ellie is enlisted to help, though she can’t quite figure out how she got drafted for the task. It’s only once they get there and see the empty bedroom, the list of things Daisy will need before classes start, the sea of far more organized looking parents around them, that she realizes she’s been brought in as back-up, the steadying force Hardy had so needed during his second go at the Sandbrook investigation. Tess can’t get the weekend off, apparently—this fact is mentioned once, by Hardy. Daisy doesn’t react and the topic is not broached again.

They get to work furnishing Daisy’s new life. Fred has come along for the ride and helps pick out a bathroom set with a sailboat pattern that Daisy says will remind her of Dorset should she ever feel homesick. Hardy spends the whole day suspiciously quiet; when Ellie catches his eye she thinks he looks vaguely ill. 

“Feeling alright?” she asks him, when Daisy steps out of the room for a moment. Fred is absorbed in trying to fold a fitted sheet that is several feet longer than he is.

Hardy has sat himself heavily down on Daisy’s bare mattress. He looks small in the way he had after his surgery those years ago, when he’d first seemed to realize that he still had a family and no longer needed to crawl off like an injured rabbit to die alone. “M’fine, Miller.”

She has that urge again, now, to reach out and touch him, to provide the physicality of comfort where words fail. But Daisy returns, arms full of linens, and Ellie shoos Hardy out of the way in order to make up Daisy’s bed with crisp new sheets. 

The day wanes. By the time Daisy’s room is more or less in order, there’s enough time left for an early dinner before the long drive back, and they settle on a curry place overflowing with other exhausted-looking parents and first year students. Hardy is beginning to look properly traumatized by the whole experience, but he seems to be trying to muster himself in order to not spoil Daisy’s mood. 

“Your flatmates seem alright,” he says. “But don’t let them get you into any trouble, right? For the first year at least you should focus on your studies, settling in and all—”

“Dad, please,” Daisy retorts. “I don’t need this right now.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got to say it, because I’m here.” 

They both look to Ellie, then, as though expecting her to choose a side, and she’s so struck by the similarity of their expressions that she laughs out loud, at a volume she almost forgot she was capable of.

It’s late when they say goodbye. Fred is on his last legs, and Ellie eventually lifts him into her arms so he can snore softly on her shoulder. They walk Daisy back to her room, and she can feel in Hardy’s posture beside her that he’s appalled by the whole notion—of leaving Daisy behind, of having her be so far away in the first place.

“Alright, you have everything you need?” says Hardy, once they stand in front of her door. 

“I think so,” Daisy replies. And then, looking between them: “Yes.”

On the way back to the car, Hardy is silent, but when they stop at a street corner he reaches over and takes the sleeping Fred from her tired arms.

“She’s a good kid, isn’t she?” Hardy asks, voice quiet, with an expression she recognizes intimately even though she’s never seen him wear it quite like he is now: his lips pressed tight together, his eyes wide and liquid.

“Oh yes,” says Ellie, reaching for the car keys. “Definitely in the top ten I’ve met.”

Hardy laughs at that, the sound a little too raw, and settles familiarly into the passenger seat beside her.

She thinks of Tess on the way home, of the way she had looked at Ellie with an unmistakable pity during the Sandbrook investigation when Ellie was trotting along beside Hardy like a well-trained dog. _Alec only has one speed,_ she seemed to be trying to tell Ellie. _You’ll look like a fool when you slow him down only to find that there’s nothing underneath._

But here he is now, looking unwound in the seat beside her. She pulls her eyes away before he notices her gaze.

A month after they drop Daisy off, Ellie wakes one morning to the sound of mewling under her front stoop, only to find a scruffy-looking black cat that rubs itself against her calves as soon as it sees her. Fred wants to keep it, of course, but Ellie makes some excuse about not wanting black hair on her white furniture. There’s something in its desperate expression she finds amusingly similar to another face she knows, so on Sunday morning she carries it the few blocks over to a certain seaside house.

“Why?” is all Hardy says as she holds up the purring cat and grins madly.

“You seem lonely,” she replies, closing the door sliding door behind her and letting the cat leap to the floor. Immediately, it goes tearing off to investigate the new house.

“I’m not lonely,” he says. “I have you.”

He looks as surprised to say it as she is to hear it.

“Right,” she murmurs, looking at her feet, and stops herself from adding this: that she’s always thought he looked lonely, even in rooms full of people. And that fact has persistently disturbed and upset her, perhaps because it was such an obvious reflection of herself, these past few years.

Hardy clears his throat, directing his gaze toward where the cat has run off into the depths of his house. “Well, I’m not keeping it. I don’t have the time.”

The cat is christened Shitface and sleeps every night wrapped around Hardy’s head. He often wakes up with a mouthful of black fur.

“Bloody cat,” he says, every time it leaps onto the officially forbidden kitchen counter, even as he reaches out to scratch its ears. He rolls his eyes at Ellie’s triumphant smile.

The months pass with Daisy gone, and Hardy starts putting in longer hours again. It takes even more prodding than usual to get him out of his desk chair once the sun begins to set, and she’s only halfway through her usual attempt at mocking persuasion on a Tuesday evening when the call comes in.

There’s a report of a person poking around an abandoned house in a neighborhood where there’s been a string of armed robberies over the last few weeks. Progress on the investigation has been slow; the families robbed all reported that the burglar demanded items so esoteric that often the families didn’t even have what he asked for—a specific brand of high quality blender or family photos containing only certain dog breeds or maroon cashmere sweaters. The specificity of the robber’s interest should serve to narrow down the possible culprits, Ellie thinks, and yet no one they bring in for questioning has seemed even remotely likely.

She supposes whoever is wandering around the abandoned house could be anyone, and probably is just bored teens or squatters, but they’re so desperate for a lead they roll out anyway, speeding all the way there as day fades into night. Hardy twitches eagerly in the seat next to her, scowling determinedly at the road and then at the house, where a torch is visible moving behind one of the front windows. 

Uniforms are still a few minutes behind them. Ellie throws the car into park and leaps out, sprinting around to cover the back door while Hardy goes for the front. The torch in the window has abruptly gone out at the sound of their arrival.

Ellie slinks in the back and hears the familiar tread of Hardy’s footsteps slipping in on the other side of the house. The place has gone unnaturally still—she combs through a kitchen missing half its appliances and a den with soggy, rotting couch against one wall, feet crunching all the while on broken glass and garbage. She meets Hardy at the base of the stairs, next to a linen closet and a half bath.

“Nothing,” she says. 

Hardy’s jaw is tight, his eyes wide and alert, but it makes no difference. 

Before either of them can take a step toward the stairs, a blurred shape bursts from the closet beside them. Ellie sees an arm stretched out, sees the electric blue crackle of the end of a taser, and moves without thought or fear of any kind.

In one swift movement, she pushes Hardy backwards and steps in to take the shock herself.

The metal of the taser collides with the skin of her collarbone; she smells the burning flesh before she feels the pain, the electricity flooding through her veins and turning her warm on the inside and then hot and then scalding, fire arcing through her like water off a cliff. Distantly, she hears herself cry out, and then her legs are crumbling and her back is hitting the wall and she’s sitting on the moldering carpet, the pain dissipating, spreading into the air around her as she heaves in a breath.

Her attacker is gone. Hardy is shouting at a uniform which direction to give chase. And then he’s turning to her, leaning down, and even in the haze of pain and shock Ellie recognizes the fury in his eyes and the fear beneath it. He sees himself as someone so guarded and self-contained, she thinks, but in the end he’s more bare than any of them.

He’s shouting at her and searching for the pulse on her neck simultaneously. “Why the fuck did you do that?”

She gulps a few times, tastes blood. She’s bitten her tongue.

“Wasn’t sure how the pacemaker would handle it,” she says, reaching out to tap weakly at his chest. But that’s not quite the truth, she thinks, because in the moment where she’d stepped in front of him she hadn’t really had any rational thought at all. She just knew that she didn’t want to see him on the ground again.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, running a hand over his face.

“‘Miller’ is fine,” she says, letting out a ragged laugh. Every muscle in her body feels sore, but her breath has returned. He catches her elbow when she staggers to her feet. 

“Did he get away?” she asks, as they approach the door, his hand still planted warmly on her arm, as though he’s forgotten it.

Hardy just looks at her, expression unreadable. He shepherds her into a car and climbs behind the wheel himself.

She doesn’t comment as he steers the car toward his house, just gets out her phone to ask Beth if she’d be willing to take Fred for a while longer. The night has turned cold; she thinks she would shiver if her body wasn’t still strangely preoccupied by a combination of adrenaline and a deeper, tired ache. 

In the house, Hardy is still silent, but his fury is evident in every movement he makes. He brusquely hands her a few ice cubes wrapped in a towel to press against the raw spot where the probes connected with her bare collarbone, then looks around for something else to busy himself with. When nothing presents itself, he leans heavily against the kitchen counter and stares at the floor, avoiding her gaze.

“Oh, come on,” Ellie says, after a moment. “Aren’t you going to make me a drink?”

He doesn’t move. 

“Fine, I’ll do it myself.” She pushes past him to take two glasses down from the shelf, then inspects the row of bottles perched on top of his microwave. “Something brown should do the trick, don’t you—?”

He reaches out and grabs her wrist, but there’s no muscle in the grip. She could tear away from him, easily. She doesn’t.

“Miller—” he growls out, and she doesn’t particularly want to hear whatever lecture he no doubt intends to give her next, so she kisses him.

Perhaps unfairly, she expects him to be shocked. She expects for him to be unmoved by her spontaneity, for him to step back and stare at her like she’s lost her mind for at least a full minute and for her to leave awkwardly, shrouding her nerves in a forced cheer. And then, maybe, in three to five business days, once he’s had enough time to mull it over thoroughly in that impenetrable head of his, he would return the favor. 

But instead she is the one surprised.

The moment she presses her mouth to his he responds with such fervor that she’s forced off balance, caught only by his arms coming around to pull her closer, their chests pressing flush together as they sway on the spot. She pushes her palms into his lean back, feeling the fire of his skin through the material of his shirt. And then it’s her who’s pulling away, sucking in a breath. 

“Oh my god, you actually—”

“Oh, don’t start, Miller,” he retorts, rolling his eyes extravagantly.

She opens her mouth to quip back but then his lips are on hers again and whatever smart reply she had waiting is entirely lost.

In the morning, she wakes when the cat leaps onto the bed.

“My darling Shitface,” Ellie says groggily, extending an arm to run along the cat’s plushy side.

“Are you talking to me?” Hardy asks, shifting under the covers beside her. 

She rolls over to find his face peeking out from the duvet, watching her carefully in the early morning light, as though waiting for her to scatter into the wind. 

“Yes,” she says, laughing as she pulls him toward her. “Yes, I think I am.”

His smile is so uncharacteristically broad that she barely recognizes him. Then they are wrapped around each other again, reaffirming their choices in golden daylight, and the earth begins to spin forward again.

The autumn drags on and the world doesn’t change as drastically as she expects it to. They solve the burglary case and have jubilant, celebratory sex on Hardy’s lumpy couch and afterwards she expects to be overwhelmed by guilt, by memories of Joe, by the feeling that she’s betrayed whatever trust the town has placed back in her, but instead all she feels is warm, and strangely giddy.

Despite this, they seem to have decided on some unspoken level to keep it secret—wariness of reawakening some of the accusations made during the trial, she thinks, or perhaps just a sense that this new thing between them is fragile, and that to let too much light in on it might cause irreparable damage. They are both far too aware of how easily a good thing can be taken away.

But, regardless, Hardy spends increasing amounts of time at her house, much to Fred’s delight. Hardy sleeps over more often than not, though they go to some effort not to arrive at work simultaneously on these days. For once, though, there does not seem to be any scrutiny placed on them at all; Ellie feels wondrously, miraculously unobserved for the first time in years. A new life feels almost within reach.

“When’s Daisy coming home?” she asks one weekend morning as the three of them sit around her breakfast table. She has been reading out any particularly amusing or upsetting news from the Echo, receiving a laugh or sympathetic hum in return as Hardy puttered around the kitchen, but now that he’s sitting she fixes him with a steady look.

“The twenty-first,” he replies, twirling the spoon in his mug.

“Have you talked to her at all about this?” Ellie asks, motioning vaguely at the two of them.

Hardy spares a brief glance at Fred, who is absorbed in his cereal on the other side of the table. Ellie watches him cautiously, aware that perhaps this is a significant moment—a moment that will propel them forward, or leave them treading water, circling each other again with wary eyes. 

Hardy thinks for barely a second, then a strange smirk bends his mouth. “I haven’t,” he says. “But I don’t think it’ll be an issue.”

“No?”

His eyes are warm when he looks at her. “She thinks rather highly of you.”

Ellie grins cheekily. “Smart girl, she is.”

Hardy just shakes his head, looking down into his smug with that soft smile still on his face. He looks healthy, closer to unguarded than she’s ever seen him, lean frame perched next to her kitchen table. Her mind plummets back, briefly, to that hotel room during the Sandbrook case, ages ago now. She sees him reaching a hand out for her in the night all those years ago, and thinks that perhaps he still hasn’t let go, neither of them has, and that’s what they are doing now—grasping for each other in the dark, holding on tight, and hauling one another mercifully toward the light.

**Author's Note:**

> lafayette1777.tumblr.com


End file.
